Four wins away: Dodgers take NLCS, setting up World Series vs. Yanks

LOS ANGELES — After a second consecutive exit in the National League Division Series last year, president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman, general manager Brandon Gomes and the rest of the Dodgers’ front office laid out their offseason plan.

They knew early October exits weren’t going to be acceptable moving forward. To give themselves the best chance of that not happening in 2024, the Dodgers wanted to be aggressive over the winter.

Their priority was signing two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani. Once the Dodgers accomplished that, the rest of the plan developed perfectly. In the end, the Dodgers secured all of their top targets over the winter, spending more than $1 billion in contracts.

By doing so, the Dodgers established one of the best rosters in recent memory. The expectation for the 2024 season was simple: World Series or bust.

With a 10-5 win over the Mets in Game 6 of the NL Championship Series on Sunday at Dodger Stadium, the Dodgers moved four wins shy of achieving their ultimate goal, advancing to the World Series for the 22nd time in franchise history.

“Every single team, when they get to Spring Training, they say, ‘Hey, our goal is to win the World Series this year.’ We’re one of the few teams where that’s a realistic goal — every single year,” said Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy. “There’s a lot of pressure. There’s a lot of expectations. Especially this year when you talk about some of the names we added. We dealt with a lot of injuries. We dealt with some off-field stuff that was very unfortunate. And at the end of the day, we were able to come through.”

The Dodgers will now take on the AL champion Yankees, setting up a battle between two juggernauts in the World Series beginning on Friday at Dodger Stadium. It’s the 12th time the two historic franchises will face off in the Fall Classic and the first since 1981.

“It sounds fun,” said Dodgers outfielder Mookie Betts. “They’re obviously a good club; we obviously are, too. I think the world wanted to see this. It’s going to be fun. It’s good for baseball. It’s going to be fun.”

On a team full of superstars, the Dodgers turned to a group of relievers to send them to the World Series. Without a fourth starter, the Dodgers went to a bullpen game for the third time this postseason. The first one was spectacular. The second one wasn’t.

But on the third try, the Dodgers’ bullpen did enough, using seven pitchers to get the job done. They navigated through a lot of traffic and allowed five runs over nine innings, but consistently made big pitches when they needed to, stranding 13 Mets baserunners.

“Tonight is a bit of icing on the cake,” said Dodgers reliever Evan Phillips. “We still have more to do, but to know that we can come in here in a series-clinching game and have a bullpen game and have success just gives us even more confidence. We believe in each other wholeheartedly, and we just love watching each other succeed.”

Michael Kopech got the first assignment, getting tasked with opening the game. Kopech didn’t have his best command early on, but was able to limit the damage to just one run in the first inning. He then handed the game off to rookie Ben Casparius, who had mostly pitched in mop-up duty this postseason.

The initial plan wasn’t to go to Casparius that early in the game, manager Dave Roberts said afterward. But with Kopech not looking all that sharp and the Dodgers needing some sort of length, they turned to the rookie. He delivered with four key outs.

“I didn’t know who was going to follow Kopech,” Roberts said. “Given his first inning, I had to kind of think about another way to go. I had to think through how much I wanted — I knew Casparius was going to have to eat some outs. I didn’t know how much we were going to get from him. But at that point in time, you’re just sort of playing the scoreboard and trying to count outs.”

Casparius then handed it off to Anthony Banda, who got four outs of his own. Ryan Brasier did the same to follow. Those middle innings helped the Dodgers get to their late-inning guys. That’s when Phillips, Daniel Hudson and Blake Treinen combined to toss the last four innings of the game.

“We saw in the [Division Series], they were incredible,” Friedman said. “Then we had the [Alex] Vesia injury at the end of the series. Coming into this series, we weren’t fully staffed. But then you have a guy like Ben Casparius come forward and do what he did, and it just encapsulates this year as a whole.”

This season hasn’t been anything like the Dodgers expected. They’ve gotten contributions from players they never counted on. There’s no bigger example than NLCS MVP Tommy Edman, who didn’t make his team debut until mid-August after being acquired from the Cardinals at the Trade Deadline. He finished the NLCS with 11 RBIs, tying Corey Seager (2020) for the most by a Dodger in a postseason round.

Injuries became so frequent at one point for the Dodgers that Roberts decided to hold a quick team meeting in Atlanta in late September just to remind his team how good they were. After suffering season-ending injuries to starters Tyler Glasnow, Clayton Kershaw and Gavin Stone, nobody would’ve blamed the Dodgers had they wanted to feel sorry for themselves.

Instead, here they are. It hasn’t looked exactly how they envisioned it, but this is where they expected to be: Four wins away from a World Series title after outscoring the Mets by 20 runs over six games.

“You look at what this team did in the offseason,” Edman said. “You sign Shohei, and you’ve got so many superstars. It’s kind of the expectation to have success. It says a lot about the group we have here.”